What a Data Warehouse is Not
Recently, I was at a conference, and I heard the following discussion about what a data warehouse was. One person suggested that a data warehouse was really all the old legacy systems connected by software that could access the data. By calling such a contraption a data warehouse, the organization could avoid having to do the hard and complex work of integration. There are so many problems with this federated approach to a data warehouse that they are almost not worth repeating here. But (once again!) here goes.
